Born in London in 1983, Robin Ticciati has been principal conductor of the German SO in Berlin since the 2017–18 season. This is his second appearance with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, and it reveals his obvious passion for French music. The only exception to his homage to France is Robert Schumann’s late Violin Concerto, featuring the young Russian violinist Alina Ibragimova in her Bavarian RSO début. A brooding, introverted solo part and a polonaise finale? Only recently have young musicians discovered the forward-looking qualities of Schumann’s piece, long kept under lock and key by his close associates as the work of a madman. The programme will end with the popular Second Suite from Maurice Ravel’s epoch-making ballet Daphnis et Chloè, with its brilliant written-out sunrise. Maestro Ticciati will also treat us to two French rarities. The first, César Franck’s late-romantic vocal symphony Psyché, is likewise a story of two lovers from Antiquity, heard here in four instrumental movements from the eponymous tone-poem. With dreamy lyricism and outbursts of colour, it illustrates the wakening desire of the titular heroine for the love-god Eros, also known as Cupid. And the thrilling concert will start literally with a Big Bang: a searing dissonance depicting primordial chaos in Les élémens, the revolutionary suite by the baroque composer Jean-Féry Rebel. It must have sounded like pandemonium to the ears of his contemporaries. Then the four elements assume their appointed place in the natural order of the universe – early programme music that still sounds avant-garde today!

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